Initial founder of Weblogs, Inc., ex-AOL employee and the man who Dugg Netscape, Jason Calacanis was Danny Sullivan’s guest today at Search Engine Strategies Chicago for the keynote conversation. Jason recently left his position at AOL and his Netscape project to pursue new avenues in social media, that direction still, is a mystery.
Why is a professional blogger and social news talking head speaking at an SEO & Search Marketing convention? With more and more emphasis on citizen journalism and social media in the world of Yahoo, Google, MSN / Live.com and Ask.com (along with Digg & MySpace), Jason’s world has become more and more relevant to the search engine industry.
“SEO is bullshit!” Jason Calacanis
Jason says his initial plans were to stay with AOL for one year after he sold Weblogs, Inc. to them for an estimated $25 million. Jason says he enjoyed his time at AOL but he’s an entrepreneur at heart and missed the excitement of building & launching new companies.
Jason says that today he has accepted a position at Sequoia Capital as an Entrepreneur in Action; building new & incredibly profitable companies. Sequoia has backed YouTube and some other successful start ups over the past few years.
Jasonisms :
* How does one become an A-list blogger? Go to Techmeme everyday and blog about your views on stories which have reached the Techmeme homepage. You’ll be an A-list blogger in 30 days.
* What I love about blogging is there is nothing between you and the publisher, so a stupid post I make before I go to bed can catch wildfire.
* People who think Netscape copied Digg are 12 year old Diggers on Digg.
* Netscape is growing although Nick Denton keeps slamming us and saying it is going down.
* SEO is bullshit, if you generate a web page with good content Google will rank the page properly.
* Slimebuckets ruin each new industry and ruin it for everyone with spam, across the mediums of social news, seo & email.
* Editorial process at Netscape helps identify spammers and horrible top 25 lists which are designed as spambait or linkbait.
* Payperpost and similar paid review blogging models do nothing but dirty up the blogosphere like someone dumping trash on our city streets.
* On the ReviewMe company and their transparent paid blogging model:
* On paying Diggers & Reddit contributors to come over to Netscape : “People who get paid usually do a better job. These users deserve to get paid for what they are doing.”
* I really hope AOL continues to support Netscape as its only 4 months in. Netscape has more uniques as Digg has more pages.
* We encourage sites to make their own submissions and sites should be able to promote themselves by submitting their own content to Digg, Netscape and even their own Wikipedia profiles.
* Word association on AOL “… (long pause)… Transition”, Google “Good, Unstoppable”, Netscape “the future”, AdSense “I love you”, SEO “Keep it simple”… ValleyWag “liar, evil, idiot, stupid”
